Author Archives: William Ramp

“I’m writing this while listening to news of devastating fires in California. Climate change has made catastrophic fire events a new normal in Western North America. Every household is now urged to put together a ‘go bag’ or ‘bug out bag’ against potential evacuation, including identification and ownership documents and family photos. These days, as […]

“Cut flowers are often left at gravesites and at locations where sudden death has taken place. Their cutting and consequent wilting provides a symbolic parallel to the ephemerality of human existence and of the ties we make in our mortal lives. To be born is not only to leave the womb but to be severed […]

“As they age, both women and men now become less visible, if at different rates and to different degrees. (It is likely that those egotistical and misogynistic men who aggressively deny that this process applies to them are driven by a repressed and powerful fear of it, just as were the men who used vanitas […]

“Mansfield’s note, then, speaks of more than the universal love triangle. It also sounds out from the now-silent world of the early 20s in Europe and urban America; one in which moral, class and artistic certainties had been shattered by war, though they were still clung to by churchmen and the old families, and brandished […]

“There were fishing folk online, and their love of and longing for the boats and the water was palpable and poetic. What little I knew of tug crews from my early life had been different: these could be hard men; rough, no-nonsense and quick with profanity when a lubber or another boat got in their […]

“I am known for walking with my eyes to the ground. This may be taken by some as evidence of my melancholy character. To my Edwardian great-aunts, it would have been evidence of future posture and moral problems; a sign that I might not be fit for the muscular, Christian manhood that the imperial projects […]

“This stark universe forms within as well as without. It is haunted by the consequences of isolation, indifference and exploitation and by specters of fear, failure, self-hate and self-defeat. These remove us from contact and co-embodiment, encouraging us to self-differentiate into categories of immunization: users versus useless, fit versus fat, lovable versus loathsome. Notionally free […]

“Perhaps, there’s a need to revisit another category of heroism: virtuous action and extraordinary bravery that arises out of something other than adherence to a personal code or ruined chivalric hierarchy, or to action in its own right as a dare to chance or fate. What about heroism dedicated to human commonalty; driven by loyalty […]

“I suspect that Walter Benjamin, should he return, shuddering, to our era, would protest the sirens urging us toward the shoals of some epic chimera of greatness or defensive unity. I think he would also resist refuge at some cozy preindustrial hearth or in some rewilded grove. I wonder what he would make of successor […]

“In Christian worship, in the Episcopalian tradition, the Eucharistic Host is received in one’s hands, palms up and together. The gesture in the parking lot seemed as if it were allowing some harbinger of grace and mercy to drop through the widening gap between the spread hands; or perhaps the gesture framed an emptiness where […]